DESIGNING THE U.S.S. DISCOVERYEven though it wouldn’t appear until the third episode, the U.S.S. Discovery was the foundation of STAR TREK’s new design aesthetic.
When DISCOVERY's co-creator Bryan Fuller started to think about the series, he knew that he wanted the show to look radically different to anything we had seen before and inevitaby the Discovery itself would be at the center of this. “When I sat down with the art department,” he remembers, “I said ‘OK we’re designing a new ship and it’s going to be an opportunity to do something interesting and different.’ I wanted to pay as many homages to the original series as possible, but we wanted to use more modern elements for the ships. STAR TREK couldn’t look like it did in 1969, because we don’t look like that future now and it’s only 50 years later. I wanted to create a new aesthetic for STAR TREK.”
Fuller and his production designer Mark Worthington found inspiration in some work that had been done by legendary designers Ken Adam and Ralph McQuarrie in the 1970s for a STAR TREK movie called Planet of the Titans. A lot of design had been done, but the film was never made. As Fuller explains there were a series of drawings that showed a redesign of the Enterprise with a triangular body. “Their Enterprise was a fantastic ship that had a distinct silhouette. It was different from the traditional saucer and nacelles, and it had a bit of that blocky seventies vibe. I liked that; and I liked the silhouette.”
CINEMATIC INSPIRATIONThose drawings became something of a touchstone for Fuller’s approach to the entire series. He responded to the seventies design aesthetic and he wanted to embrace the epic approach that Ken Adam had established as the production designer of most of the James Bond movies. “I’m very aesthetically driven,” Fuller says, “and I liked having the idea of using that era as an inspiration. We talked quite a bit about Ken Adam’s designs for Bond. In my original story DISCOVERY was meant to be a spy story so it made sense.”
After Fuller and Worthington had agreed on their basic approach to the look of the Discovery, concept artist John Eaves was brought onboard to design the ship. He was given three sketches and told to use them as inspiration. Two of them were produced by Adam and McQuarrie. The third sketch was by a man called Paul Christopher. “He’d done a real quick, sketch,” recalls Eaves.
“It was just a whole bunch of basic stuff – a little Federation stuff, a little Klingon stuff. He had that on the wall and it was a bit of a departure from the McQuarrie and Adam one.”
SECRET MISSIONAfter viewing Eaves’s first round of sketches of Discovery, Fuller added a critical requirement – under no circumstances should the resulting ship feature round nacelles. “Bryan just said that he wanted to see something different,” recalls Eaves. “He didn’t explain why – alll I knew was that he wanted a whole different look to the nacelles.”
Fuller reveals that there was a very good reason behind his request: later in the series, Lorca’s ship was going to disguise itself. “Discovery needed to be able to jettison its saucer section and transform itself so it could pose as a Klingon D-7 battle cruiser. That was why we didn’t want to have round nacelles. It was going to be used to infiltrate Klingon space. The outer ring of the saucer would have been jettisoned and become
a gyroscopic space station, 2001 style. The inner part of it would have spun around inside the outer ring to generate gravity.
“The doughnut in the middle of the saucer would have become the head of the D-7 battle cruiser. The nacelles would crank down when it jettisoned the saucer section, and the ends would have come off so they looked like Klingon nacelles. That was really a big impetus for a lot of the evolution of the design of the Discovery.”
THE VALKYRIE INFLUENCEEaves went back to work producing sketch after sketch. However, nothing hit the mark. “Bryan would be fine with aspects of the sketches, but that was as far as it went. I just couldn’t figure out what he wanted to see,” Eaves says.
Around this time, Eaves brought up the idea of incorporating elements from the XB-70 Valkyrie, a prototype United States Air Force bomber from the 1950s. “We used that as kind of a basis for our design,” he recalls. “It has the gooseneck; it has that little ‘A’ shape in the back. When I showed it to the producers, they really liked that approach. The Valkyrie had these wing-tips that do all kinds of movement stuff. You could have it on a flat profile for standard flight and they could do a little more aggressive wing-drop for the work flight.”
But while Fuller liked the direction they were taking, he was still adamant that the nacelles weren’t what he was looking for. “We probably did, gosh, five or six months of Discovery drawings,” says Eaves. “But, try as we might, we just couldn’t get those nacelles the way that Bryan wanted.”
As he was working on the design, Eaves produced several color passes. “At the beginning, we were doing bare metal,” he recalls. “We were trying to do a tie between the NX-01 and the TOS Enterprise, where it was a combination of bare metal and a paint scheme. It looked really nice – there were blue/gray steel color patterns. Bryan came in one day and said, ‘Naw, let’s make it bronze or a gold.’”
Fuller reveals that there were two thoughts behind this request. “When we talked about Ken Adam’s work, we looked at James Bond’s Lotus. The first time he had that car it was white, but later on he had a copper version. The seventies felt like an interesting era for color schemes and that would be an interesting influence. But as well as trying to create a different look for the show, we were mindful of the science. Because of Discovery’s need to go where no ship had gone before, we thought it would need an extra layer of protection so we made it gold plated to help protect it from higher levels of radiation. That was something we considered doing for the uniforms too. “
Eaves and another member of the art department ,Thomas Pringle, experimented with a variety of color schemes. “We did different versions.,” Eaves says. “The gold that Bryan liked in the beginning was almost too much – it was especially bright. We did a comparison with a deeper, bronzier kind of look and he liked that, so that went through.”
GOING PUBLICThe decision was taken to unveil the ship at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con, while it was still being worked on. “They made a real quick, rough model which wasn’t really based on anything but old sketches,” recalls Eaves. Fuller certainly wasn’t satisfied with the design at this point and, work continued after Comic-Con “We had the body and the saucer down,” Eaves says, “and we had started talking about having the ball in the center. We also had the segmented saucer – it wasn’t open in the Comic-Con version, it had kind of a cone-shaped pattern going through the center of it. Then I did a version where it was open and they really liked that a lot. They went, ‘That’s pretty cool. We’ll have that as kind of a new basis of what we’re going to do from there on out.’”
At this point, Eaves was still working on the nacelles. “I was doing nacelles that were forward, that were reversed. They were all on short pylons like the McQuarrie one, except that they were angled. They had a much sleeker taper to the way they looked.”
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